Latest blogs

Ben Raskin: One of the keys to saving your own seed is the 'selection', or identifying the best of your plants to keep the seed from. If you are aiming to 'maintain' a variety, in other words to keep it as close as possible to the original genetics of that variety, then there will be specific traits you will need to keep (colour, height, pest or disease resistance for instance). Most of just want to ensure the selection performs well in our garden or farm.

Ben Raskin: Without diversity we can’t have resilience. We all need sufficient genetic material whether saving our own Open Pollinated varieties, or at the cutting edge of seed breeding. An effective legislation as well as protecting consumers must allow us all, both amateur and professional seed producers, to increase the living seed bank adapted to the changing climate.

Ben Raskin: Recently the Soil Association has been speaking out over proposed EU laws which, amongst other things, could have meant small growers and people with allotments or gardeners couldn’t swap their home saved seeds. The proposed regulations caused public outcry across Europe but luckily, last minute changes to the directive look like good news for growers and small seed companies.